Comedy in a Blanket

Indonesian jokes are not funny. No, let me rephrase that. Indonesian
jokes, told in the Indonesian language are not funny. And yes, I do speak
and understand the Indonesian language perfectly, but I still don’t
think Indonesian jokes are amusing. The only ‘Indonesian’
jokes that are a tad cynically funny are the ones recited by the long-term
expatriates periodically burnt by their local experience, like this one:
A Singaporean and an Indonesian man took a creativity test and they were
sent into separate rooms to take the test. Inside each room there were
two tools. The men were asked to make something useful with whatever they
could find in the room, using the tools. One hour passed. The Singaporean
man stepped out of the room, showed the jury a state of the art, albeit
blatant copy of an American gadget he had created. Two hours passed. The
Indonesian man walked out of the room and told the jury that he lost one
tool and broke the other.

Yesterday I searched the net for an Indonesian joke, I couldn’t
find a single one that could make me laugh my head off or simply giggle
non-stop with tears in my eyes. Well I actually had tears in my eyes,
but the reaction was more due to the pathetic phrases I read on the screen.

Why is it so tough to find decent local jokes in this country? I am not
talking about the sexist jokes the men in Indonesian offices tell their
staff, which are usually followed by a chorus of fabricated laughter (because
if you don’t laugh you will be excluded from the vertically challenged
group of the powers to be). I am talking about fresh humour, generated
by people of various classes reflecting their experience of daily life,
clever words relieving them temporarily from the harsh realities of poverty.

Is humour not a part of the Indonesian culture? Has it ever been?

Indonesian humour (read: jokes told in the Indonesian language) is divided
into four categories. They are 1) slapstick, 2) heavy in racism or 3)
commonly use wordplay, and 4) the intellectually challenged. Slapstick
jokes are frequently broadcast on local TV, in Bajaj Bajuri TV comedy
series for example, where people falling off a chair and a vomiting baby
are considered hilariously funny. Racist jokes are the second favourite
type of humour in Indonesia. The supposed ‘jokes’ are usually
about a non Chinese-Indonesian dressed up in a Chinese costume speaking
Indonesian with an inflated Chinese accent, a non Batak man shouting brusque
sentences with a heavy Batak twang. These are often seen on TV and heard
on radio, under the banner of integration propaganda instead of racism.
About the intellectually challenged Indonesian jokes - the least said
the better.

Watching a Comedy Club show a few months back, it struck me that the
stand up comedy show in Indonesia was not only monopolised by western
comedians. Not only by the Irish who tend to incorporate the F word in
every joke or by the Australian blokes who keep inventing new words like
‘Smee’. In fact in the 80s, Indonesia had a stand up comedy
mogul who originated from Srimulat, a traditional comedy group. His name
was ‘Gepeng’, contrarily means ‘Flat’ or ‘Squashed’
in English, God bless his soul. He was a hilarious stand up comedian,
a comic genius with lots of clicking funny bones.

Srimulat emerged in Solo in 1950. The group roamed and gave performances
from one town to another in Java achieving national acclaim in Surabaya
by 1961. Gepeng was the leading clown of the group. In every performance,
Gepeng stepped out onto the stage first, he always played the role of
a servant in the house of an aristocratic family. Wearing moronic make
up, Gepeng dressed in a servant uniform with a dirty towel slung over
his shoulder. He sat down, looked at the audience with his well-known
smirk, and began his funny spiel in Javanese, punctuated with a bit of
Indonesian here and there. He could hardly speak the Indonesian language
properly. He was so refreshing because unlike most stand-up comedians,
Gepeng’s jokes were not solely based on reduction and diminishing
tactics. Today, a number of Srimulat trained comedians, like Basuki. Kadir,
Asmuni and Tarzan, are still on the move and have captured the attention
of Srimulat’s huge number of fans.

I believe that humour has been and still is a strong part of the Indonesian
culture, but it mostly evolves traditionally underneath the hustle and
bustle of the nationalist drive to use the national language. The fact
is, people have to understand English to understand Seinfield’s
jokes, people have to understand Javanese to understand Javanese jokes.
Just like Balinese jokes or the Malay’s comic ‘pantun’
in Sumatra, most of them are untranslatable. Humour is behind every word;
once you change the words into a different language, you usually lose
the humour. What may be funny in one language or one culture may not be
funny in another.

Ancient evidence that humour has been propagating in this country is
the existence of the Javanese Punakawan. The Punakawan are the unique
characters found in the Mahabharata epic, in both the Javanese and Balinese
versions. In Java, the Punakawan are made up of the hilariously funny
brothers, Gareng the limping man who always manages to say the wrong thing,
Petruk who likes to ridicule atrocity with his humour, and Bagong, the
dim-witted, insipid shadow of his father. Semar, the father and the wise
caretaker of the Pandawa who has a supernatural ability that is greater
than the gods, always joins his sons at the end of every scene to straighten
up the twisted wisdom jocularly narrated by the sons. Around the 13th
century, when Majapahit was in power in the archipelago, the son of King
Brawijaya created the Punakawan characters we still enjoy today. The formerly
depressed commoners took comfort from the funny shows and further developed
the funny characterizations from one generation to another. Nowadays,
many Indonesian men think that they are reminiscent of Semar, though their
behaviours are more like Petruk, Gareng or Bagong.

Stand up comedy in Indonesia is not only monopolised by western comedians.

In a nutshell, comedy in Indonesia has been a strong part of Indonesian
culture and has developed over the centuries. It’s not so obvious
now, because it’s hidden under a layer of the newly introduced national
language.

Do you want to hear a funny Indonesian joke? Learn the local dialects.